Handy, cleaning app, makes a valiant effort to steal your future money without the slightest hesitation.

I’m a mess, and hate cleaning up after myself. It just sucks. To solve this, I try to figure alternatives to doing it myself, and when I found an application that promised that they would solve this ongoing issue, I readily signed up.

All of my interactions with Handy can only be described as completely absent of any morality or any consideration for what my needs are as a user. They deliberately obfuscate the narrative with the expectation that you will just not remember to cancel the service.

I had a previous attempt at getting a specific number of cleanings and not just signing away my life, which was a similar experience to what occurred below. Read on for more.

I searched for “Jersey City cleaning” on the most evil search engine that exists today (the one with the 4-color logo that makes them look hip and fun, that dehumanizes its workers by giving them all the amenities that a child would love and find delightful. But at least they get free lunches!).

Oh, fuck, I thought. Its these assholes from last time. They totally tried to rip me off. Well, here goes nothing. I click. I’m redirected to the app, but was logged out. I log in and begin the quest to get my apartment cleaned in a reasonable fashion that doesn’t involve my face getting ripped off.

When you sign up for 6 months cleaning, they quote a rate of say $93. Then when you’re in the app, it drops all mention of the 6 months.

I sent an email to clarify:

Clearly, the intent was to understand the duration-related text, and to explicitly get a confirmation that it will only last for 6 months, as one would expect based on the application’s own words.

…? At no point did I ask to cancel. I asked for clarification and an explicit guarantee of what was initially agreed to.

Hm, Christian didn’t seem to understand me. The preceding picture is my attempt at clarifying, again, the 6 months, and my deepest desire to get a confirmation for my records. Someone new has emerged (what are the chances that Christian and Princes are real names? How is this OK?)

Someone new responded. Someone named Princes. Exciting stuff happening.

Handy sucks and doesn’t honor their marketing. Don’t give them your money.

Holy shit the rabbithole only goes deeper.

The 6 months text only appears on the initial app flow, when youre starting to sign up. The, even if you look for it anew, you can’t find it at all. Here are some photos.

First, the interface looks like this when you first use it:

Then the interface changes to properly gaslight you when you think “hey wait a second I totally remember something about 6 months.” I’ve always tried to focus on truly creating value for people in my own software and it is sad to see a well-funded startup up to such dirty tricks. There’s no way around this, it is completely deceptive and disgusting.

Here is the interface, after you’ve logged in:

Magic! I love magic. This is amazing. Have any of you ever had Jedi Mind Tricks played on you in this way? I’m thinking of starting a web app where people can describe trickery of these sorts in a nice conversational UI so that the world can start to hold these services accountable for their bullshit deception.